If you’re a college student chances are you spend a lot of time sitting. Sitting in class; sitting in the library; sitting in your dorm room; sitting in your friend’s apartment; and sitting while you’re studying, watching movies, and playing video games. You likely know that being a couch potato is probably not a great idea when it comes to your health, but it turns out living a sedentary life in college, and beyond, can be so bad for your body that it can kill you. Not violently, of course, but slowly, over the seven fewer years you’re likely to live.

If you regularly sit down for six or more hours a day, here’s a timeline for your fate. Enjoy.

T-Plus Zero

As soon as you sit down your body starts to fail. Why? Because humans weren’t designed for extended sitting. Once you sit down, the electrical activity in your muscles slows so much that your body’s calorie-burning rate drops to one calorie per minute. That isn’t good. And for those marathon online gamers: If you sit for a full 24-hour period while dispatching bad guys and completing quests, your body will experience a 40 percent decline in glucose uptake in insulin, which starts you down the road to type 2 diabetes.

Think you’re safe if you exercise? Think again. Even if you work out every day the deterioration begins the second you stop moving.

T-Plus Two Weeks

It only takes your body five days after switching to a sedentary lifestyle to start completely falling apart. After five days of sitting more than six hours a day, your body begins increasing fatty molecules called plasma triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, which is the bad kind of cholesterol (LDL = lethal, HDL = healthy), and insulin resistance. Your muscles will stop burning fat and your blood sugar levels will increase, which means you’ll start putting on the pounds. After two weeks your muscles begin to atrophy and your body’s maximum oxygen consumption drops, making simple physical activity, such as climbing stairs, more difficult.

T-Plus One Year

Long term effects begin to manifest in couch potatoes after a year. Weight gain and high cholesterol are typical, and women can lose up to 1 percent of bone mass a year by sitting more than six hours a day. That’s not good news for women, who also have to battle the effects of osteoporosis at a higher rate than men.

T-Plus 10 to 20 Years

Sitting on your keister for more than six hours a day for a decade or two will shorten your lifespan by about seven quality-adjusted life years, which, by the way, are the ones you want to hold on to. It also increases your chances of dying of heart disease by 64 percent and your chances of getting prostate or breast cancer by about 30 percent.

So What Can I Do to Stop the Couch Potato Madness?

This may all sound terrible, but there’s actually something you can do about it. You only need to do two things to break the couch potato cycle and live a longer, healthier life: 1) stand once an hour and 2) get about 30 minutes of physical activity a day.

In fact, studies show that taking short breaks from sitting once an hour will actually defend against most of the problems caused by a sedentary lifestyle. You don’t have to exercise during these breaks, either. Anything that results in “moderate activity,” such as cleaning your dorm room or talking a walk around the quad, should do the trick.

Even better, the 30 minutes of physical activity doesn’t require exercise either, and it can be broken up throughout the day, which is perfect for things like short walks from your dorm room to class or for climbing up and down the stairs to wash a load of laundry in your dorm’s washroom. Even walking across the room counts, although you’d have to do it a lot because it doesn’t take long to walk the eight feet from one side of your dorm room to the other.

 

You’re probably going to sit a lot in college and probably for the rest of your life. Just beware of sitting for extended periods and give yourself lots of breaks from sitting and your body won’t break down as fast.